Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World

This history of popular entertainment takes a long-zoom approach, contending that the pursuit of novelty and wonder is a powerful driver of world-shaping technological change. Steven Johnson argues that throughout history, the cutting edge of innovation has lain wherever people have been working the hardest to keep themselves and others amused.

The Invention of Air

Best-selling author Steven Johnson recounts - in dazzling, multidisciplinary fashion - the story of the brilliant man who embodied the relationship between science, religion, and politics for America's Founding Fathers. The Invention of Air is a title of world-changing ideas wrapped around a compelling narrative, a story of genius and violence and friendship in the midst of sweeping historical change that provokes us to recast our understanding of the Founding Fathers.

Rabid: A Cultural History of the World’s Most Diabolical Virus

The most fatal virus known to science, rabies kills nearly 100 percent of its victims once the infection takes root in the brain. From Greek myths to zombie flicks, from the laboratory heroics of Louis Pasteur to the contemporary search for a lifesaving treatment, Rabid is a fresh, fascinating, and often wildly entertaining look at one of mankind’s oldest and most fearsome foes.

How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World

In this volume, Steven Johnson explores the history of innovation over centuries, tracing facets of modern life (refrigeration, clocks, and eyeglass lenses, to name a few) from their creation by hobbyists, amateurs, and entrepreneurs to their unintended historical consequences. Filled with surprising stories of accidental genius and brilliant mistakes - from the French publisher who invented the phonograph before Edison but forgot to include playback, to the Hollywood movie star who helped invent the technology behind Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

Everything Bad Is Good for You

From the author of the New York Times bestseller Mind Wide Open comes a groundbreaking assessment of popular culture as it's never been considered before: through the lens of intelligence. Forget everything you’ve ever read about the age of dumbed-down, instant-gratification culture.

Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond

Interweaving history, original reportage, and personal narrative, Pandemic explores the origin of epidemics, drawing parallels between the story of cholera - one of history's most disruptive and deadly pathogens - and the new pathogens that stalk humankind today, from Ebola and avian influenza to drug-resistant superbugs.

Spillover

The emergence of strange new diseases is a frightening problem that seems to be getting worse. In this age of speedy travel, it threatens a worldwide pandemic. We hear news reports of Ebola, SARS, AIDS, and something called Hendra killing horses and people in Australia - but those reports miss the big truth that such phenomena are part of a single pattern. The bugs that transmit these diseases share one thing: they originate in wild animals and pass to humans by a process called spillover. David Quammen tracks this subject around the world.

The Fever: Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years

In recent years, malaria has emerged as a cause célèbre for voguish philanthropists. Bill Gates, Bono, and Laura Bush are only a few of the personalities who have lent their names - and opened their pocketbooks - in hopes of curing the disease. Still, in a time when every emergent disease inspires waves of panic, why aren’t we doing more to eradicate one of our oldest foes? And how does a parasitic disease that we’ve known how to prevent for more than a century still infect 500 million people every year, killing nearly 1 million of them?

The Hot Zone: A Terrifying True Story

A highly infectious, deadly virus from the central African rain forest suddenly appears in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. There is no cure. In a few days, 90 percent of its victims are dead. A secret military SWAT team of soldiers and scientists is mobilized to stop the outbreak of this exotic "hot" virus. The Hot Zone tells this dramatic story, giving a hair-raising account of the appearance of rare and lethal viruses and their "crashes" into the human race. Shocking, frightening, and impossible to ignore, The Hot Zone proves that truth really is scarier than fiction.

Asleep: The Forgotten Epidemic That Became Medicine’s Greatest Mystery

In 1918, a world war raged, and a lethal strain of influenza circled the globe. In the midst of all this death, a bizarre disease appeared in Europe. Eventually known as encephalitis lethargica, or sleeping sickness, it spread worldwide, leaving millions dead or locked in institutions. Then, in 1927, it disappeared as suddenly as it had arrived. Asleep, set in 1920s and '30s New York, follows a group of neurologists through hospitals and asylums as they try to solve this epidemic and treat its victims - who learned the worst fate was not dying of it, but surviving it.

The Demon in the Freezer

"This book will give you nightmares," cautions The New York Times. Richard Preston takes us inside the ongoing war against bioterrorism, investigating the anthrax attacks of October 2001 and the potential for a future bio-attack using smallpox or, worse yet, a new superpox virus resistant to all vaccines. "As exciting as the best thrillers, yet scarier by far, for Preston's pages deal with clear, present and very real dangers," says Publishers Weekly.

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

In Jared Diamond’s follow-up to the Pulitzer-Prize winning Guns, Germs and Steel, the author explores how climate change, the population explosion, and political discord create the conditions for the collapse of civilization. Environmental damage, climate change, globalization, rapid population growth, and unwise political choices were all factors in the demise of societies around the world, but some found solutions and persisted.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells, taken without her knowledge, became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first immortal human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than 60 years.

The Professor and the Madman

Part history, part true-crime, and entirely entertaining, listen to the story of how the behemoth Oxford English Dictionary was made. You'll hang on every word as you discover that the dictionary's greatest contributor was also an insane murderer working from the confines of an asylum.

This Is Your Brain on Parasites: How Tiny Creatures Manipulate Our Behavior and Shape Society

A riveting investigation of the myriad ways that parasites control how other creatures - including humans - think, feel, and act. These tiny organisms can live only inside another animal, and, as McAuliffe reveals, they have many evolutionary motives for manipulating their host's behavior. Far more often than appreciated, these puppeteers orchestrate the interplay between predator and prey.

Epidemiology: A Very Short Introduction

Epidemiology plays an all-important role in many areas of medicine, from discovering the relationship between tobacco smoking and lung cancer, to documenting the impact of diet, the environment, and exercise on general health, to tracking the origin and spread of new epidemics such as Swine Flu. It is truly a vital field, central to the health of society, but it is often poorly understood, largely due to misrepresentations in the media.

One of Us: The Story of a Massacre in Norway - and Its Aftermath

On July 22, 2011, Anders Behring Breivik detonated a bomb outside government buildings in central Oslo, killing eight people. He then proceeded to a youth camp on the island of Utøya, where he killed 69 more, most of them teenage members of Norway's governing Labour Party. In One of Us, the journalist Åsne Seierstad tells the story of this terrible day and what led up to it. What made Breivik, a gifted child from an affluent neighborhood in Oslo, become a terrorist?

Michelle in New York City says:"A Thoroughly Researched and though provoking Book"

Polio: An American Story

This comprehensive and gripping narrative, which received the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for history, covers all the challenges, characters, and controversies in America's relentless struggle against polio. Funded by philanthropy and grassroots contributions, Salk's killed-virus vaccine (1954) and Sabin's live-virus vaccine (1961) began to eradicate this dreaded disease.

Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation

What sparks the flash of brilliance? How does groundbreaking innovation happen? Answering in his infectious, culturally omnivorous style, using his fluency in fields from neurobiology to popular culture, Johnson provides the complete, exciting, and encouraging story of how we generate the ideas that push our careers, our lives, our society, and our culture forward.

The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry

The American Slave Coast tells the horrific story of how the slavery business in the United States made the reproductive labor of "breeding women" essential to the expansion of the nation. The book shows how slaves' children, and their children's children, were human savings accounts that were the basis of money and credit. This was so deeply embedded in the economy of the slave states that it could be decommissioned only by emancipation, achieved through the bloodiest war in the history of the United States.

King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa

In the late 1890s, Edmund Dene Morel, a young British shipping company agent, noticed something strange about the cargoes of his company's ships as they arrived from and departed for the Congo. Incoming ships were crammed with valuable ivory and rubber. Outbound ships carried little more than soldiers and firearms. Correctly concluding that only slave labor could account for these cargoes, Morel almost singlehandedly made this slave-labor regime the premier human rights story in the world.

Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation

One of New Jersey’s seemingly innumerable quiet seaside towns, Toms River became the unlikely setting for a decades-long drama that culminated in 2001 with one of the largest legal settlements in the annals of toxic dumping. A town that would rather have been known for its Little League World Series champions ended up making history for an entirely different reason: a notorious cluster of childhood cancers scientifically linked to local air and water pollution.

Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War

Grunt tackles the science behind some of a soldier's most challenging adversaries - panic, exhaustion, heat, noise - and introduces us to the scientists who seek to conquer them. Mary Roach dodges hostile fire with the U.S. Marine Corps Paintball Team as part of a study on hearing loss and survivability in combat. She visits the fashion design studio of U.S. Army Natick Labs and learns why a zipper is a problem for a sniper.

Publisher's Summary

This is a thrilling historical account of the worst cholera outbreak in Victorian London and a brilliant exploration of how Dr. John Snow's solution revolutionized the way we think about disease, cities, science, and the modern world.

The Ghost Map takes place in the summer of 1854. A devastating cholera outbreak seizes London just as it is emerging as a modern city: more than two million people packed into a 10-mile circumference, a hub of travel and commerce, teeming with people from all over the world, continually pushing the limits of infrastructure that's outdated as soon as it's updated. Dr. John Snow, whose ideas about contagion had been dismissed by the scientific community, is spurred to intense action when the people in his neighborhood begin dying. With enthralling suspense, Johnson chronicles Snow's day-by-day efforts as he risks his own life to prove how the epidemic is being spread.

From the dynamic thinker routinely compared to Malcolm Gladwell, E.O. Wilson, and James Gleick, The Ghost Map is a riveting story with a real-life historical hero. It brilliantly illuminates the intertwined histories of the spread of viruses, the rise of cities, and the nature of scientific inquiry. These are topics that have long obsessed Johnson, and The Ghost Map is a true triumph of the kind of multidisciplinary thinking for which he's become famous. This is a book that, like the work of Jared Diamond, presents both vivid history and a powerful and provocative explanation of what it means for the world we live in.

For all those interested in public health, biostatistics, epidemiology, polution, city planning, civil engineering, anthropology, sociology, industrial hygiene, & victorian history this is a wondrful way to spend about 6 hours. The reader is the books equal, both are impressive.

Most of the book is a fascinating mix of Victorian English social history and medical detective story. The last quarter changes gears dramatically to become a paean to urbanization and the power of mapmaking in sociological study. Pretty incongruous. Still, it's worth it-- especially if you need a shorter book.

The Ghost Map is a great combination of learning about 19th century London, about epidemiology, biostatistics, public infrastructure. All this is wrapped up as a detective story. The narration & sound is outstanding. At its core, Ghost Map tells the story of a cholera outbreak in London in the 1850s, and how an enterprising doctor & minister figured out its source. The book does tend to stumble a bit after this story is told (which consumes more than 6 hours of the 8 hour book). In the final section, the author seeks to explicate the modern implications of what John Snow accomplished in his 1850s investigation. This last section is weak when it talks about computer mapping & electronic directories, but much stronger in its discussion of avian flu & contingency planning for same. I actually recommended the book to several people at my company who are deeply immersed in the flu planning. It should be a very readable antidote to the usual stuff they have to consume,

This audiobook is a somewhat interesting account of the deadliest out break of Cholera in London's storied history of outbreaks. It gives an interesting account of city life for lower class Londoners of the day and insights as to how the medical and scientific community of the day operated. It gets a bit dry after the first half, and the ending of the book leaves the subject almost entirely to speculate about the future threats of bioterrorism and nuclear warfare.

The "Conclusion" and "Epilogue" of this audiobook are full of proselytizing about the greatness and moral superiority of city dwellers who are apparently more intelligent, more tolerant, more environmentally conscious, just all around better people. This was written by an inhabitant of NYC who says he would only move after 50,000 people had died in a viral catastrophe, and then only reluctantly.

He also theorizes that cities are more likely to survive a long term shortage of oil, since people in cities don't drive cars as often. This is laughable. How does food get into the city? ON A TRUCK. Also ships. How does it get from the port? ON A TRUCK. What do trucks (and most ships) need to run? Oil and gas.

There is also a good bit of detail about how viruses work and how the microbial world operates, but this books insight is greatly damaged by implying that people who believe in God are superstitious obstructionists, since God cannot be proven, but people who are not willing to betray a peaceful and spacious existence outside of cities are an affront to mother Gaia, since Gaia is DEFINITELY real. No proof required.

Other than the political proselytizing and speculation, this is an okay book.

This is the story of Dr. John Snow and the development of modern epidemiology and germ theory. As a history of science read, this book is very good. It has lots of drama and reads like a mystery. I did learn about Snows research into anesthesia, something I didn't know about. Most of the book centers around the cholera outbreak in London and Snow's work to counter the generally accepted miasma theory. This is a great book for young researchers to see how prevailing paradigms can be completely wrong, yet generally accepted and even unquestioned.

This is an analysis exceptionally rich in perspective. Johnson brings a multidisciplinary approach to the subject that is just as fascinating as the approach of Dr. Snow that Johnson recounts.

Johnson then uses similar breadth to analyze the impact on our time, and our near-to-medium term future, of the cholera outbreak and the lessons learned from it. While one may agree or disagree with his conclusions, they are solidly based and cogently argued.

To label his conclusions as socialist is to confuse socialism with sociology.

This book should have been interesting: the cholera epidemic in Victorian London, the birth of germ theory, the beginnings of epidemiology. Unfortunately the author couldn't keep his eye on the prize. The story was disjointed, and rambled and I had a hard time paying attention. Pity.

This book is really a hidden gem for history buffs. It did a lot to paint a portrait of the lives of the common folks of London, and by extension, other major cities of the mid-19th century. I found its insights into developments in public sanitation and its impact on modern cities very interesting. It also does a good job of showing how early scientists struggled to win support for ideas that we now view as obvious. Also, the book is great for illustrating how seemingly average people can have a big impact on their communities and the world. Finally, one thing it does is make me happy that I don't have to clean any cess-pits. Enjoy.

This is a well written, well researched history. The author it clear when a point is just not known (this is good), and he makes excellent connections between the epidemic and science of Victorian England and that of today. The epilogue, which is perhaps overlong, is an interesting, well thought out extension of his subject to the world today and in the future. It's well narrated. An interesting 8 hours which might have been an even more interesting 7.

I was already familiar with most of the story, but I loved the detail and personalities. It is not for the squeamish since it deals with sewage systems and human waste, but if you can get over that it is wonderful. It is *not* incongruous to be talking about sociology and mapmaking since this a premier example of mapmaking for sociology and medical science. One of the best science books I have heard.